01 April 2019

Two Americas - A National Emergency on Steroids (Addended)

George Rebane

A couple of mornings ago NPR’s Morning Edition reported that the illegal entrant rate across our southern border has exceeded over a million per year, and that the border security and illegal alien handling facilities are overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, the Border Patrol has now abrogated the role of the US Customs and Border Protection agency in turning the illegals loose into our society with minimal or no ability to track their identity, origin, or intentions. All we know is that they will quickly disperse and emerge in ‘sanctuary’ communities where all manner of public doles to succor them await.

The national border crisis is daily attested by the reports from the border and testimony from homeland security and border control officials past and present. Recently they were joined by several Obama era higher-ups including former Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson who testified that there is indeed a border crisis in progress.

In the face of this, the country’s anti-American political faction continues to celebrate, promote, and sustain this deluge of indigents, the human trafficked, criminals, diseased, and economic opportunists that are now pouring across our southern border. They also communicate their welcoming message in the “shithole countries” of Central America, well-funded messages that induce desperate people and dubious opportunists to undertake the long and dangerous journey north through Mexico. Our progressives don’t care for the migrants’ welfare or risk involved during the journey. Their only objective is to maximize the number of illegals who successfully penetrate our border, who then become political fodder within a byzantine and broken immigration system. Ultimately their presence and large numbers will serve anti-American ends one way or another.

Astoundingly, there are even many pro-American light thinkers who cannot understand the necessity for and cost-effectiveness of an improved and extended physical barrier to span critical sections of the border. They swallow the argument of the anti-Americans that what we really need is to greatly expand and improve the welcoming facilities to house, feed, care for, and relocate the arriving hordes. All such responses will do everything to increase the flow and nothing to stem it. It is the analog of calling for more bailing buckets instead of patching the hole in a sinking boat. There is no public awareness or discussion of the longer-term impact that these indigents and their now accelerating arrival rates will have on our institutions, economy, and citizens. The existential goal of the anti-Americans is to simply keep the ingress rate high and increasing. No one has asked, ‘How and when will this massive migration of illegal aliens stop?’

For all intents and purposes, socially and ideologically we are already two countries sharing the same landmass and a contentious dysfunctional federal government. The two countries are readily apparent to anyone who pays attention; no longer sharing cultures, values, mores, histories; in short, two distinct ontologies are operational in America today. (An ontology is a comprehensive world view that covers all of one’s perception of existence, and how its particulars interrelate to create what we experience and believe.) Today our leftwing innocents cannot connect our social programs, entitlements, expressions of social justice, higher taxes, more regulations, and ever larger government as waypoints to socialism cum communism (autocracy to tyranny). They have been taught that we are a democracy gone awry, and that we need to get more people involved voting directly for public policies and all political candidates – the notion of a republic is foreign to them and smacks of the corrupt capitalistic elites depriving people of their rightful power and share of wealth. Their history does not teach that democracies ALWAYS end badly as tyrannies.

And most progressives are also taught a very simplistic picture of governance. Most visible today is their denial of their socialist objective. Their constituencies are told daily that since the US does not yet practice all the trappings of socialism, then therefore we are not on our way to that end. For them it’s the all/nothing, yes/no, true/false world they are preaching – nuances, shadings, and obvious precursors are banished from their narrative. A perfect example of such a denial was recently contributed by a local progressive intellectual Dr Milan Vodicka in his essay on socialism (here).

In the Left’s ontology all cultures are equal along the dimensions that really count. For example, they cannot attribute culture as the explanation for why students of Chinese and Japanese descent do well in school, and what has happened to black America’s culture in the last fifty years (e.g. Jason Riley’s ‘Culture Explains Asians’ Educational Success’). They cannot attribute culture as the prime causal factor for entire countries that stay mired in national corruption, crime, stultifying poverty, and/or religious tyranny. And, of course, they cannot foresee what culture clashes have already done and promise in our country as assimilation toward a formerly shared American culture has today become an arrogantly rejected option.

To our Left, the millions pouring illegally across our southern border are either seen as culturally moot, or worse, culturally calamitous to our social order to facilitate the ongoing fundamental transformation. Anyone who points out the cultural bases for social conflicts here and elsewhere is immediately accused of being a brown skin rejecting racist. But cultural clashes have little to do with race as attests the progress in the social and commercial environments of such all-white countries as Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and, of course, Russia.

Our coming apart has a rich literature documenting its progress. Contributors include sociologists, economists, historians, and, of course, national pundits in the popular media (here and on numerous blogs like RR’sGreat Divide category). We have covered most of this literature over the years, mostly into an intense and entertaining local headwind of progressives who form part of the Left’s grass roots contingent. Their people are either ignorant of what is going on, since their media outlets eschew coverage of what many now acknowledge the Great Divide, or they belong to the cynical elite. The latter oppose the notion and any discussion of the Great Divide, primarily because they don’t want to wind up with a territorial and/or political division that leaves them with a decimated workforce that is mostly devoid of wealth-generating skills. Since the Left’s recently declared objectives for America have extinguished any hope of a common ground for rapprochement, the Right’s response to these denials and attacks is the biblical, ‘Let my people go!’

[Addendum] We may have passed a major milestone on the road to recognizing the Great Divide. No less than the progressives’ primary policy analysis organization, their august Brookings Institute has finally published Divided Politics, Divided Nation – Hyperconflict in the Trump Era by Darrell West. (more here) As can be seen in the title, the lion’s share of the blame for this lands on President Trump. While at least half the country saw Obama as the most divisive president since FDR, West remains true to his publisher, but does have the insight to conclude “that societal tensions have metastasized into a dangerous tribalism that seriously threatens U.S. democracy. Unless people can bridge these divisions and forge a new path forward, it will be impossible to work together, maintain a functioning democracy, and solve the country’s pressing policy problems.” Of course, the country is divided on much more than “pressing policy problems”, but that insight may have to wait for the passing of the next milestone on the way to the Great Divide. (H/T to reader)

Comments

We cannot get there from here unless we agree on the path to our future.

Each of the tribal factions, conservative <—> socialist, lower class <—> upper class, Republican <—> Democrat, Trumpsters <—> Never-Trumpers, all want to take a different path to the future.

It is clear our inability to visualize a shared future, takes us down different paths, widening the divide. That divide is becoming more evident every day, in the comments on this blog. The failure of Nevada County to come up with a comprehensive economic development plan. The growing central valley and coastal financial split.

The states failure to solve the housing crisis, while welcoming millions of poorly educated and low skilled workers to a state on the cusp of an intellectual machine revolution which will transform the employment landscape, accelerating the divide.

As the middle class is squeezed out of the state by the growing cost of housing and the gutting of middle-income jobs, the divide between wealth coastal elites and central valley communities will continue to grow.

Evidence of the Great Divide is everywhere in our economics, our culture, and our politics. Why is it so hard to recognize the truth!

The technology divide will be as big as the cultural divide as AI takes over more and more mundane jobs held by people with low tech skills.

Jobs will be disrupted and the way people work will change, experts said.

The future of work will be dramatically transformed by artificial intelligence, so Americans should be prepared to engage in lifelong learning, tech experts said Monday.

“New technologies are changing so quickly that any of us who are even experts in the field get out of date very quickly,” Lynne Parker, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s assistant director for artificial intelligence, told attendees of The Economist’s “The AI Agenda” event in Washington. “So nationally, we need to foster an environment where we are used to the idea that we’ll have lifelong learning. It’s no longer that you go through K-12, or you go through college, and you’re done.”

Parker highlighted some of the government’s attempts at reskilling the workforce to keep up with the changing landscape and encouraged all industries to emulate such efforts. She also said jobs are being affected across the board and “to a wide range of extents,” but it is important to embrace new technologies, such as AI, to alleviate some of the impending challenges workers will face.

“Regardless of what kind of job you have—whether it’s in manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, or law—there are ways that AI can help you. It can provide tools to get rid of some of the mundane kinds of tasks,” Parker said. “However if we are not comfortable with those tools, [...] then we will feel like we will have our hands tied behind our back.”

Trump is going through the last twitches of a dying snake. Oh yeah, Mexico is going to pay for the wall. Sure.

Even Fox news is giving up on him They are waiting for the tub of orange goo to crash.

"Fox News host Shepherd Smith on Monday utterly destroyed President Donald Trump’s entire immigration policy, saying his threats to cut aid to Central America, close the border, and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico were no solution, and calling instead for comprehensive immigration reform."

Interesting that the great pony tail of ignorance doesn't know shep is a nevertrumper. Whats really funny is the TDS eruption sounds more like the lefts narrative fail is going through the las twitches of a dying snake just like CNNS ratings post report! LOL

"Trump is going through the last twitches of a dying snake."
-Punchy 318pm

Yet another prognostication based on nothing but an all consuming desire for the bad Orange man to go away.

You might want to work on local issues, Paul. Like the reported flooding of California by mail orders for large capacity magazines as out of state companies are waking up to the fact that there's a gold rush fueled by 18 years of pent up demand, along with a sense that it might not last.

With Trump in office until Jan '2021 or Jan 2025, and the Blue Slip process no longer applying to allow DiFi and Harris to block 9th Circus nominees, it looks like it might last for awhile.

I hope our liberal readers will now show us how one million illegals per year, with no end in sight, is not a national emergency. Their tactic so far has been to declare it's not a national emergency because, as if by magic, their just denying it has made it go away.

Don Shep is the Fox news choice to be the main guy during the afternoon news programming so I assume he reflects the opinion of the management team that put him there. This is separate from the shrillbillies that occupy the evening news slots-Hannity etc that do not pretend to be newscasters but are only there for the entertainment of right wing chest thumpers such as the Circle of Jerks that infest this blog.

You know what they say about assume it makes an ass of u..... oh great pony tail of ignorance. He is a news reader not an opinion guy. Stop projecting your pathological issues onto the management @ FOX. They pay the ones you hate a ton more than shep. El mal-jerko.

Shep has 1/4 the viewers of the after work shows, the house fraus like the bitchy drama on his hour. It amazes everyone how little you know about the media.

A conference featuring eight prominent 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls kicked off in Washington, D.C,. with the fiery rallying cry of a fugitive cop-killer on Monday, as the labor and political groups in attendance shouted in unison, "We have nothing to lose but our chains."
Jamal Watkins, the Vice President of Civic Engagement at the NAACP, began by telling the audience at the We the People conference that he would invoke the words of Assata Shakur, whose real name is Joanne Chesimard.

Shakur was convicted of the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper when she was in the Black Liberation Army. After escaping from prison in 1979, Shakur fled to Cuba, which granted her asylum even as she remains on the FBI's list of most-wanted fugitive terrorists.

If you paid attention to Trump Paul Emery you would know he praises all those FOX folks EXCEPT for Smith. And Smith is the outlier on FOX as he does not say nice things about Trump. I personally never watch him as his approach fopr some reason irritates the hell out of me.

FOX is not turning on Trump and therefore you are just spewing more fake news.

Wasn't it Shep who was aghast at the cannibalism in the Superdome during Katrina? He has a very special niche at Fox news, representing the left perfectly in so many ways, he is the epitome of what fair and balanced news should look like. L

Interesting that the Murdock’s boys will tell you privately that they kinda hate Fox. Don’t like it. They want to be loved by the Leftinistas like Flake. Give it 5 years and Fox too will get it wrong more times than lamestream media and the popinjays. Then Fox, like our current fakenews media, will also have the uncanny tendency of doubling down on stupid.

When Obama came into office in 2009, he railed and railed about Fox. Really got under his skin. Reminded me of Bubba railing and railing about Rush. On and on Bubba, the man with the biggest pulpit in the world, whined about Rush. But, what genuinely surprised me the most of all happened during Obama’s last two week of office. Instead of focusing on his last words to the nation, Obama start bitching about Fox News again! Fox really took up too much space in his noggin in his last days as POTUS. Obama entered office complaining about Fox News and left office eight years later whinning and dissident Fox News.

One would think that since the far radical left owns 95% of the media, they would not care bout Fox. They have NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS. all of NBC including MSPMS and Rachel Madhouse, CNN and all the major print, all of Public Education, all of the decadent entertainment industry, control social media and still they bitch about Fox, lol. What a bunch of greedy bastards. They want to control all of it, everything. Then the local wetbrains run over here and bitch about Fox! Unbelievable. If I watched and soaked up what they watched, I would be as ignorant and dumb and wrong and stupid as our retarded Popinjays.

Fox is a great example of the Great Divide. The right and true libertarians just want to exercise individual rights and be left alone. On the other side of the Divide, the unhinged mush for brains want to control everything. Everything! They are about power, absolute power. They are the Inquisition looking for heretics. Having one outlet like Fox out there is unacceptable. They do not live by “live and let live”. They are illiberal. They have become the censors, the haters, the uniformed, the book burners, the thought police. They salivate at the idea of shutting Fox down. Tyrants. Evil doers.

Well, Fox with Tucker and Sean sure nailed it with the Russian Collusion Police State Hoax fanned by the Leftist News Broadcasting.
Nobody is calling for Fox to apologize for messing up sooooo bad, lol. And Fox would apologize when wrong....something the Enemy of the People scum sucking sacks of shit on the Left cannot ever do. It’s not in their nature. They think they are always right no matter what the mountains of evidence says. Another example of the Great Divide.

And get this: the Leftinistas deny the existence of the Great Divide, ROFLMAO.

As Fox News goes down Blaze TV is rising with a growing list of conservative commentators and entertainers. You can get Blaze TV on most streaming devices, including Apple TV, Roko, Amazon Fire TV, and others. Our favorite is Mark Levin, who is also on Fox News on Sunday at 7 PM. Enjoy!

George: Not with standing my disagreement with your analysis and the responses of your followers..I noticed the graph. I also disagree with the specific curve identifications...but the format is really good. I do agree that the 'overlap' varies depending on the issue and this is a good graphical tool. Is this your creation or is there a reference? Peter V

"your followers"? PVZ, there aren't "followers" here. There are people who converse here that are not clutching George's words like a coinpurse at the dollar store. I'm here because of George's hands off approach to moderation in one of the few blogs that having a differing opinion on hot button issues, say, on "Climate Change", does not get you kicked off.

The format of overlapping distributions of populations is pervasive ... I'm not sure what you're asking.

No doubt the Blue Mob curve needs to be centrist and the 'Hard Right' is a tic shy of Mr. Hitler, the Challenger of Peace proved that if nothing else.

To some extent, I'd say that something this complicated that's reduced to a couple of dimensions risks not reflecting reality in any meaningful way, but models are useful things.

I've been arguing with myself about drawing a similar chart, but have a strong feeling that the axis have shifted in the last 20 years. The struggle has moved from traditional public policy and towards something new. We'll see.

PeterVZ 1145am - The graph is mine, but showing such concepts as locations on an ideological dimension with overlapping distributions is a mature method of conveying both data and information that has leaked from the tech sector to popular media. I'd be interested in the parts of the graphic you have disagreement with and why.

The Democrats temporarily have become a hopeless party. As the Russian collusion fraud vanished, so did any possible argument that there isn’t really a crisis on the southern border. The Trump tax and deregulation reform, which Speaker Pelosi called “the worst disaster in history” (no “constructive Trumpian hyperbole” here), maintains a full employment, noninflationary economy with rising family purchasing power and a growing workforce.

The Democrats haven’t got the message, but those who aren’t punch-drunk out of their senses will decode the political message the night of the election in November 2020. Then, when they have dug out from under the rubble of their fantasies, they can start to rebuild. Both parties have to do it from time to time. The country still seems to like to change parties in the White House every eight years, but the Democrats will have to do better than this farrago of nonsense and nonentities.

I'm not so sure but then I think water is wet, so who am I to judge? (thanks and a hat tip to Douglas Adams' HHGTTG)

FYI there's a fine example of the use of overlapping normal/Gaussian distributions in the first few pages of "The Bell Curve" Chapter 13, which delves into differences by ethnicity, the chapter that started most of the fireworks. What a firestorm erupted over that topic, mainly by folks primed towards misundertanding by cultural and political stances.

“”There has never been a purely free market economic system, just as there has never been a purely socialist/communist system. Let’s do an experiment. First, rank countries according to whether they are closer to the free market or the communist end of the economic spectrum. Then, rank countries according to per capita gross domestic product. Finally, rank countries according to Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report.

“Here’s our finding: People who live in countries closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum not only have far greater income and wealth than people who live in countries toward the communist end; they also enjoy far greater human rights protections. Moreover, it’s the socialist nations that have murdered tens of millions of their own citizens such as the case with the former USSR and China.”